The Centre for Parallel Processing is looking for a researcher who can contribute to research in Distributed Computing Infrastructures, in particular in clouds, desktop and service grids, working for one of the FP7-funded research projects running in the Centre: ER-flow, IDGF-SP and SCI-BUS. The researcher is also expected to be involved in software development and infrastructure management activities.

E-infrastructure embraces the trinity of hardware, software and people (education and training). The UK e-Infrastructure Academic User Community Forum was created to maintain and grow the community of UK researchers who use computers of any shape or size in their research, regardless of discipline or domain. The community was central to the development of the Strategy for the UK Research Computing Ecosystem (Oct 2011), which largely influenced the Department for Business, Innovation, and Skills (BIS) publication A Strategic Vision for UK e-Infrastructure. This resulted in the Government investment of £165M in UK e-infrastructure, helped to bring the e-Infrastructure Leadership Council (ELC), co-chaired by David Willetts, Minister for Universities and Science, and Professor Dominic Tildesley, into existence, and was influential in the recent Government investment of £600M in “eight great technologies” including big data.

Science gateways are a community-specific set of tools, applications, and data collections that are integrated together via a web portal or a desktop application, providing access to resources and services of distributed computing infrastructures (DCIs). Science gateways offer the potential to open the utilisation of DCIs to wider audiences by providing a customised and easy to use user interface to access large computational and data resources. The complexity of the underlying infrastructure can be completely hidden from the end-users by a suitably tailored interface. As interest in science gateways has accelerated in the past few years, an increasing number of new user communities can utilise grid or cloud computing resources in a convenient manner.

The workshop aims to bring together researchers and scientists from different scientific domains, along with science gateways developers, to discuss problems and solutions in the area, to identify new issues, to shape future directions for research, foster the exchange of ideas, standards and common requirements and push towards the wider adoption of science gateways in e-Science.

New developments and services for research and scientific communities are high on the agenda at Cloudscape V, 27-28 February 2013 at the International Auditorium in Brussels. (http://www.cloudscapeseries.eu/Pages/Home.aspx)

Sneak Preview:

• ‘Sustainable Clouds for a globalised Research Environment’ - Day 1, 27 February: policy recommendations from a recent extensive study on cloud computing for eScience; the federation of cloud resources and role of standards; cloud strategies for research and education networks.
• ‘Open Collaborative Models, Open Data, Big Data’ – Day 2, 28 February: cloud solutions based on open source and open standards; big data challenges in the cloud and open data as a catalyst for economic growth.
• Keynote on Cloud4Science – Day 1, 27 February. This is a new initiative aimed at enabling scientists around the world to access high performing cloud services to run multi-discipline experiments. This initiative is supported by partners who have already demonstrated the benefits of cloud for research.